Mysticism and Hard Reality/Art with a Message.
“The spirits of their dead inhabit the giant trees. To cut down these trees would be to kill the vessel that harbors the souls of ancestors”. – Christopher Achobang, Cameroonian environmentalist
“I followed my father’s footsteps ever since I was a little boy, Mahmet Om, an indigenous Batek man from Malaysia once told me. When we were in the forest, he would point and say, ‘there is a hornbill’. I would follow him into the forest and watch him blow darts from a blowpipe…We used to go hunting in the forest over there before the forest was turned into an oil palm plantation”.
Rainforest dwellers see things in the forest we do not. Less than 2% of equatorial sunlight reaches the floor of a rainforest creating a cool twilight even in midday. The forest speaks to them. Its odors reveal a hidden presence, bird calls can contain subtle but clear warnings if you understand the language, a sudden breeze under the canopy may foreshadow a coming storm, mud tunnels of termites snaking up the trunk of a forest giant foretell the danger of collapse and deep silence can signal the proximity to a tiger. Forest hunters redefine stillness, hardly a breath, nothing but eyes moving, patiently watching, listening. Now they are trying to warn us of a coming environmental Apocalypse, of our own making – and we are clearly not listening.
Most of the rainforest’s biomass exists above the ground, leaving the equatorial soil impoverished. Once this seemingly impenetrable rainforest is cut down, the exposed soil quickly washes away in tropical downpours. The rainforest, if left undisturbed, would need a millennium to recover but, of course, we know, that will never be allowed to happen.
Every day 32,300 hectares (80,000 acres) of rainforest is destroyed and an equal amount degraded. The carbon that was sequestered in the trees is added to the atmosphere, further warming it. With the fruit-bearing trees gone, there is no food. Rare and endangered species in the rainforest, many unknown to science, are undergoing a fast-forward mass extinction.
In 2019, Brazil singlehandedly accounted for one-third of global tropical primary forest lost – 1.4 million hectares (3,459,475 acres). Between 2001 and 2019 Brazil lost 24.5 million hectares (60.5 million acres) of primary forest, more than double number two Indonesia. That is slightly larger than the U.K. It is Malaysia, however, that lost the highest percentage of rainforest at 14.4% between 2000 – 2012.
Ancestors of the Batek have been in Southeast Asia for 80 -100 thousands years, being a remnant clan of the first humans to migrate out of Africa, but that pales compared to the Malaysia rainforest. It has been around, uninterrupted, since the time of the dinosaurs. The Malaysia rainforest is 110 million years old – home to endangered tigers, Asian elephants, Malaysian gaur (a wild bovine species), tapir, gibbons, monkeys, over 300 species of birds, over 1,000 species of butterflies and supports over 14,500 species of flowering plants and trees making it the most diverse ecosystem on the planet.
This series explores concealed histories, unseen events in equatorial rainforests from three continents – their mysticism and hard reality. These ancestral rainforest homelands are the planet’s largest living carbon sinks, that have, for millions of years, helped keep the planet cool. No longer.
Now, to a person, the cultural identities of the Rainforest Sentinels represented in this collection are as threatened as their ancestral rainforest homelands, by corrupt, unregulated resource extraction, feeding our global consumer appetite. For these indigenous Rainforest Sentinels, the end game is upon them.
“Do not go gentle into the good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
Dylan Thomas
